Erstwhile Sweet Baboo
by EstellaB
Summary: Linus opened the Valentine almost as a ritual. It was never a surprise, was it?


**My first Peanuts fic. Man, I love these characters, and I hope I've done then justice, but in case you didn't know-All belongs to Charles Schulz. (Lucky chap...)**

Linus opened the Valentine almost as a ritual. Who else would send him a Valentine but Sally Brown? Her crush on him had been cute, if irritating, when they were little-and, as Charlie Brown liked to remind him, Linus had wanted to marry her when they were toddlers.

Honestly, statements made when you're a kid should not be held against you for the rest of eternity. It's not kind.

He had sort of expected her to lose interest when she went to school. After all, kids passed daisy chains and kissed on cheeks in elementary school. He was a year older (and how much difference that made!) and he knew how these things worked. Much to his relief, he couldn't compete with daisy-chain-passing, cheek-kissing first-graders. Unfortunately, he could still hear her crying _sweet baboo_ whenever he went round to Charlie Brown's house. He had to choose between that and Lucy's bellowing of _blockhead! _Sally was a little more bearable, so he put up with it. Then he'd hoped that, during junior high, she'd fall madly in love with a baseball player. Or a football player. Heck, she could fall in love with a _football_, just as long as it got her to lay off him. He blamed her perpetual infatuation for the fact that he still had his security blanket. After all, he had to cope somehow. And junior high really is too young to start drinking.

And then high school? He'd begged and pleaded to go to an all-boys private school. He offered to work and pay the fees. Nope, no such luck. He'd been shifted off to your ordinary, common-or-garden high school with the rest of the gang. One year later, there she'd been.

To give Sally her due, she hadn't been quite as clingy at high school. She'd still called him her sweet baboo, of course. Her first day, the day that she had walked right up to him at lunch (that sweater her mom had made her wear, with sheep on it, and he hair exploding wildly out of its plait), plonked her tray down next to his, and greeted him with "Hey, sweet baboo," he'd thought his life was over. And it was, in a way, because the guys from his year never sat with him again. He'd gone back to Charlie Brown, Patty (she'd ditched the 'Peppermint' somewhere in junior high) and even, he shuddered to remember, his own sister. Sally hadn't really been so bad. She'd even collaborated in their Great Matchmaking Attempt (all that happened was that Charlie Brown had ended up in the nurse's office, and Patty had threatened to move schools) way back in his junior year. Lucy and Pigpen had unkindly left the two of them to clear up the mess with the teachers, and she'd been pretty good at getting them out of it without _lying _precisely.

Now he was in bible college, and she was a senior, but he wouldn't be surprised if she still sent the stupid card. After all, even after he'd moved to college, he'd still heard that _sweet baboo _call in his ears. For crying out loud, he still heard it in his dreams! He suspected it would plague him for the rest of his life. Though it was supposed to be Charlie Brown who had the bad luck, wasn't it?

She wasn't going to go to college. He guessed that she wanted to, but she'd never get the grades; besides, Sally was always going to be the type to get married out of high school. Uh, if she'd ever met anyone to turn her off her sweet baboo, that was. She would have made a terrible student, anyway; she'd had enough trouble sharing a room at summer camp, and he laughed to think how she would have coped with doing so for whole semesters at a time.

He was already walking over to the trash can as he tore open the envelope, pink and smelling of girl stuff. How did girls do that, anyway, make their envelopes smell of perfume? He was pretty sure his envelopes just smelt of… envelope.

He couldn't help the feeling of anticipation as he slid the card out, because Sally's drawings hadn't really gotten any better since second grade, but that never stopped her having a go. Sally had a lot of faults, but one of them wasn't exactly a lack of pluck. Last time, she had made a picture of the Great Pumpkin dispersing hearts (it was so bad that she'd annotated it-without her scribbles, he would have thought it was some sort of ill-advised hairdo). That one had been so preciously awful that he'd actually kept it, though he wasn't sure where it was now. Maybe tucked in the back of his yearbook? (He'd been voted _Most Likely to Marry Sally Brown_, to his frustration and her open delight).

Seriously, though? He looked twice at the card. Had she gone store-bought for the first time in her life? The picture was actually _decipherable-_and not only that, it was a sickeningly-sweet love-heart. Sally's pictures were always bizarre-unique, she called them. If it wasn't the Great Pumpkin, it was a picture of Snoopy dressed as Cupid (yeah, _that _had been upsetting), or Charlie Brown officiating at their wedding.

Shudder.

That wasn't her handwriting, anyway, inside; it wasn't his name, either. Well, actually, it _was _his name, which was what really convinced him that the card wasn't from her. In cards from her, he was always hailed as _sweet baboo. _

Hmmpf.

Suddenly, Linus' blood ran cold. Charlie Brown had once told him that, if Sally didn't send her sweet baboo a valentine, she was probably dying of bubonic plague-_and in that case, she'd probably send me to do it for her._

But there's many a true word spoken in jest, Linus remembered (he didn't know who'd told him that; if it was Lucy, he'd get her back later) and he picked up the phone, frantically dialling Charlie Brown's home number. (Charlie Brown was having to reapply for college; Snoopy's brother Spike had eaten his application form).

A few minutes later, a sleepy (he'd forgotten about the time difference; never mind) Charlie Brown had reassured him that no, his sister was not dead, dying or otherwise in danger. Relieving his friend with one breath, he then proceeded to crush him with the next. Sally wasn't in hospital, but she was on a date. With the captain of the baseball team, apparently.

Linus instantly felt protective. Sally couldn't go on a _date_, she was too young and naïve and-wait, she was eighteen, wasn't she? Probably not too young or naïve or any of those things then, really, so why was he so worried?

Linus slammed the phone down without saying goodbye to his friend. Three, two, one, and then he couldn't fight the urge any more; he pulled the ball and chain out from a drawer, thinking that that was another thing to get Lucy back for.

Clutching his security blanket in one hand, he sat down and began to write a very long letter.

He opened it with the words, _My Sweet Baboo…_

**Please review :) CC loved, flames reported/deleted.**


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